Odysseus elytis critical essays

In a review of a later work, O ilios o iliatoras (1971, translated as The Sovereign Sun, 1974), a writer for the Virginia Quarterly Review echoed Keeley’s eloquent praise: “An intuitive poet, who rejects pessimism and engages in his surrealistic images the harsh realities of life, Elytis is a voice of hope and naked vigor.

Elytis was relatively unknown outside his native Greece when he was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1979. Although the Swedish Academy of Letters had bestowed the honor upon other previously little-known writers—among them Eugenio Montale, Vicente Aleixandre, and Harry Martison—their choice of Elytis came as a surprise nonetheless.

Regarded as one of the most touchingly human and poignant works inspired by the war, the poem has since become one of the writer’s best-loved works. Elytis’s To axion esti (1959, translated as Worthy It Is, 1974), came after a period of more than 10 years of silence.

With the advent of the World War II, Elytis interrupted his literary activities to fight with the First Army Corps in Albania against the fascists of Benito Mussolini. His impressions of this brutal period of his life were later recorded in the long poem “A Heroic and Elegiac Song of the Lost Second Lieutenant of the Albanian Campaign.”